Write well because writing poorly gets you nowhere.

Writing Rant

July 03, 2013

Because I process the world through words, if words are in front of me, I read them.

And since there happened to be a container of Milk Chocolate Salted Caramel Macadamia Clusters in front of me, I read the container. (This is an old container that Mark uses to store screws, so I actually didn't increase my calorie count. Yay!)

Here's the description some marketing guru wrote, thinking it would entice us to buy the goodies.

My first thought was, "Why didn't the writer use 'covered in chocolate'"? Well, because he had already used it to say they would be "covered in soft, creamy caramel." So, at lest he didn't commit one sin of writing which would be to repeat the same word too close to its previous use. But he could have looked a little harder in his trusty thesaurus.

January 10, 2008

If you're new to Write Well Me, read this to understand why I tell you what I'm reading. :-)

I finished Guilty Pleasures pretty quickly, and I was on to one of the books Chris bought me for Christmas. I don't feel that I'm a terribly picky reader, and I've forced myself to finish books that were mediocre.

Last night I put down The Vampire of New York in disgust. I had only made it to page 66, and that was me being kind. I didn't care about the characters or the plot, and the poor writing was driving me crazy. This author had been told to show and not tell, and so he (I couldn't find out whether Lee Hunt was male or female, so I'm going with male) thinks by giving lots of detail, he's showing, not telling. He still tells, though.

Here's an example of a passage:

Detective Max Slattery of the NYPD Cold Case Squad looked like Winston Churchill in a butch-cut toupee. He had the kind of face that belonged on a bald head, but his snow-white hair was a perfect bristled flattop exactly half an inch long over a vast expanse of glowing pink scalp. His hangdog jowls were clean shaven and the thought of growing a mustache had never occurred to him. Everything about him was square: face, shoulders, barrel chest and short, powerful legs. Years ago someone had taken a Spuds MacKenzie Budweiser poster and taped Slattery's picture over the dog's face. The caption read: AREN'T YOU GLAD HE'S ON OUR SIDE? A lot of people thought he'd been the inspiration for Andy Sipowicz character on NYPD Blue, and the average reaction on meeting him for the first time was that he was nothing but a dumb Mick cop. He wasn't. He was an extremely smart Mick cop who'd solved more homicides than anyone else in the history of the New York Police Department.

He was also getting old with twenty-eight years on the force, having worked everything from Warrants and Central Robbery to Missing Persons and Manhattan North Homicide. He'd now been with the Cold Case Squad since it was formed in 1996--more than a decade. In two more years he'd reach mandatory retirement, and he knew the boredom would probably kill him. He'd been a cop for almost thirty years and with very few exceptions he'd enjoyed every minute of it. He'd chewed up a few marriages and countless other relationships, lost partners to violence, disease and promotion, and never been on the pad for more than a cup of coffee.

Now get this VERY next paragraph:

The offices of the NYPD Cold Case Squad are located in a squalid little building in Brooklyn. It looks like every other police squad office only more so. Everything is out-of-date, from the telephones to the computers. Everything is either green or brown or beige. Everything is worn out, one way or the other. There are filing cases lined up against the walls, battered lockers and rows of battered desks. There is a police administrative assistant--PAA--named Doris Dubukian, who is a bottle blond, as old as Max Slattery, and who has a memory that is unbeatable when it comes to the mundane. Ask her the names of the first five batters struck out by Sandy Koufax in the first game in the 1963 World Series, and she'll answer immediately: Tony Kubek, Bobby Richardson, Tom Tresh, Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris just like that. Behind Doris and Max's back there were whispered rumors of a long-standing affair between the two of them. Rumors were utterly unfounded.

For the first two paragraphs, the author writes in traditional past tense. Then, all of the sudden, we're in present tense, which is like hitting a log in the middle of the road. In a suspense novel, the words need to be moving the reader forward, not getting him stuck in paragraphs of description.

So I put down The Vampire of New York, and went looking for another book. Luckily, when I bought the first Anita Blake book, I also bought the second in the series. Yay me! I've never been so happy to start a book in my life. Good-bye The Vampire of New York. Hello The Laughing Corpse!

November 17, 2006

So I ranted, and, boy, did I get some different opinions. Lisa herself even commented on what I wrote about how I disagreed with her. And she did so very graciously, I'd like to add.

Catch up on the comments on the rant I wrote and Lisa's blog post she was driven to write. :-) Here's the most important excerpt in case you're pressed for time:

Imagine you put your heart and soul into creating a Power Point that reflects every thing you hold dear and when you show it at a meeting, the first words out of your boss’ mouth are, “There’s a typo on slide 9.”

Now reverse that, and imagine she says, “These ideas are great, tell me more about what you think.”

And then after you’ve shared the inner secrets of your soul she says, “I want the world to see this, so let’s present it as perfect as we possibly can.”

That is what good writing does - presents the idea to the world in the best possible way so that everyone who reads understands those inner secrets.

November 01, 2006

The day (the day, I tell you!) after I read Lisa's article "Beware of Grammar Gestapo," I found this article in the Washington Post.

Because the new SAT has a section testing how well students can assemble and disassemble (harder than assembling - believe me!), grammar is becoming more popular in English class.

The article talks about how grammar disappeared in the '70s and '80s, but that's not completely true for me. My formative grammar years were during that '70s/'80s time, and I learned all about prepositions, participles, gerunds, diagramming sentences, and more. However, I know that lot of my contemporaries have never diagrammed a sentence, and they say they've never heard of a predicate nominative. I must have had some English teachers who were old school. :-)

"Clauses and Commas Make a Comeback" highlights the teaching life of Mike Greiner who teaches grammar in between literature to his high school students. Here are his Seven Grammatical Sins for your enjoyment:

7. Griener. It's Greiner; I'm an exception to the rule about i and e.

6. Many writers think commas are cool, semicolons are special and sophisticated. Use a semicolon between independent clauses.

5. english. Capitalize the most important subject . . . or proper nouns.

4. Between you and I . . . Use the objective case, i.e., me, after prepositions.

3. This is her. Use the nominative/subjective case for predicate nominatives.

2. Grammer. If you'd like an A in English, spell grammar with 2 A's.

1. I'm doing good in English this year! Really? Are you curing cancer or helping the homeless? If not, use the adverb well, not the adjective good.

I would have been happier if he had had Eight Grammatical Sins and included pronoun agreement, but I'll be happy with these seven for now.

October 31, 2006

I've talked before about how much I love Lisa McLeod's on-line newsletter, Forget Perfect. I read every article, even those I don't think will really interest me because they do, in fact, interest me. It's a nod to her fabulously conversational and witty voice that keeps me glued to her articles.

Her latest article made me so mad that I woke up Chris to complain to him about it. (Take a few minutes and go read it so that you're all caught up with Dawn's rage.)

Oh, by the way, this post IS a rant, so if you're turned off by that sort of thing, stop reading and come back Thursday when I talk about a less ranty topic on bedrooms and sanctuary. Aaaahh.

Now back to the rant.

In her article, Lisa talks about how those who think that writing well is important sap the life out of creativity. (Now do you get why I'm mad?) She says she was discouraged from sending a letter to Mad Magazine because her English teacher critiqued it too harshly.

I feel sorry for Lisa that she let one person's comments keep her from doing something that to this day she regrets. How much do we read and hear that if we're really passionate about something we should go ahead and do it anyway? It's like what Scott says: do whatever it takes. How passionate are you about something if one person can shut you down? Oh, and that leads me to something else Scott says: stand up, speak up, or get shut down.

(This rant really is about Lisa's article, not Scott's blog, but Scott's blog is so fun, easy, and full of common sense that it's a great resource.)

Lisa also cites an excerpt from Stephen King's book, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. In it, King describes a childhood experience in which he wrote a grisly story, and his teacher was horrified. Now, the teacher was horrified by the gory stuff that was in the story he wrote, not so much by the bad spelling. What she commented on was the gory details. Lisa tries to use this as an example of how teachers and others shouldn't harp on grammar and spelling and such.

That wasn't King's point. His teacher wanted to know why he was wasting his talents writing like this. Her words (quoted by King): "What I don't understand, Stevie, is why you'd write junk like this in the first place. You're talented. Why do you want to waste your abilities?" Not a thing in there about how he shouldn't even attempt writing since he couldn't spell. She admitted that he had an incredible talent.

King goes on (I have my own copy of his book) to say that he was ashamed of what he had written. Again, not by the bad spelling and grammar, but by the content. He says he spent the next forty years feeling ashamed about what he wrote.

Now that's a great example of how we should just keep on and do what we're meant to do despite what the naysayers say. However, this isn't a good example of how the "grammar Gestapo" should just leave us be.

Lisa's plea to her readers is this:

Correct English is the worst way to articulate something. If I tell you that at my last family reunion we ran woefully short of poultry due to an equipment malfunction, you don’t understand the situation as well as if I write, “my second cousin told everybody ‘We don’t got no fried chicken ’cuz daddy done broke mamma’s deep fry tryin’ to boil the tar off his lug nuts.'”

The final blow for me was "so us writers intentionally ignore the rules and say things like 'the person with a smile on their face' (instead of his or her face) knowing that as enough of us add a gender neutral pronoun to the vernacular, it becomes accepted practice."

We writers do nothing of the kind.

Okay, so let me get this straight. If enough of us say something incorrectly, then the incorrect version becomes correct? Is it just easier to do it incorrectly than to make an effort to do it right? I can think of several ways to avoid the awkwardness of assigning a gender. If you're trying to describe the person with a smile, then I'm betting you know the gender and just say "the person with a smile on his face." If you're talking in general about a smiling person, then you don't need to point out a specific person; you could say something like "people with smiles on their faces." Or just take the plunge and assign a gender: "The person with a smile on her face." Gasp!!! Can we really do that?

Yes.

We don't have to be stuck with incorrect pronoun agreement. If you know the correct way to do it, and you do it incorrectly, I think it makes you look lazy. (Now, I'll say right here and now that one can deviate from "proper" grammar and usage for stylistic reasons. Heck, I do it all the time. However, there are some things that just aren't right any way you cut it.) Take the time to do it right.

Epilogue to this story: my family absolutely agreed with me about the pronoun agreement. To explain to my seven-year-old, I used this example: "It's like saying that if enough people declare that 2 + 2 = 5, then that will be an accepted answer." You might think that it's going overboard, but I don't think so. If you have a singular thing, you need a singular pronoun. If you have a plural thing, you need a plural pronoun. How is that different from basic math facts?

Final Conclusion: This post was written using about 90% correct grammar and usage. I gave myself 10% leeway for the informal and conversational tone of the blog. I'm guessing that you were able to understand my writing and didn't feel that the good grammar ruined the story.